you can make your server require encryption from everything connecting,a dnt he native client will handle it automatically:SQL Server Configuration Manager and click properties for "SQL Native Client Configuration", if correct, you should be able to see two flags, one is "force client encryption", which you want to toggle to yes.

seperate from that, when you build an application with a connection string, one of the parameters is Encrypt=yes;

river1 (2/6/2010)But there is no problem with encrypting a connection because it uses SQL Server authentication instead of windowns authentication, correct?Or i can only encrypt connection if they use windows authentication to connect to the server?Thank you.

the encryption is for all the packets transferred to and from SQL Server, regardless of any authentication protocols or any other settings; so it's fast and cheap to just make the server require encryption.

you cannot be selective and make only one authentication type require encryption; about hte only option might be that you could make an application always use encryption even if the server did not require encryption by default, by adding to the connection string.

Lowell--There is no spoon, and there's no default ORDER BY in sql server either.Actually, Common Sense is so rare, it should be considered a Superpower. --my son

SSL is an https connection for a web page, using port 443 by default. in theory, i can go to your web page via https, but your web server goes to a different server for SQL data via the default of port 1443. so the data between your Web server and your SQL server is not encrypted. , but when the data is passed back to me via https SSL on the web connection, it is encrypted.

The same thing for when you connect directly to the SQL Server via SSMS or your application or whatever...the traffic passed back and forth is not encrypted.That is the SQL specific info we were giving you, so you can easily force the traffic to and from the SQL server to be encrypted.

Lowell--There is no spoon, and there's no default ORDER BY in sql server either.Actually, Common Sense is so rare, it should be considered a Superpower. --my son

But in my case, my apps are intranet apps made in Visual Basic. This are windows aplications they do not use the browser.

In this case, what i want is that because my VB aplication connects to SQL Server via SQL Server authentication, and because SQL Server authentication goes in plaintext by default, anyone with a sniffer or with profiler can see the passwords of the users that are hard coded inside my VB aplication.

what i want is that this informations can not be seen by sniffers of by profiler so i think i want to encrypt it.

yeah, encryption can be confusing; I didn't know SSL was an added layer; so I learned something today; (as usual here on SSC) Thanks Eduard!

river by changing that flag i mentioned before, "Force Protocol Encryption" to yes, you will achieve what you were after; traffic going to and from your SQL server will be encrypted. so your application will be more secure.

you can grab a scanner and see if you are not sure, or of course there's lots more information on MS or via google if you need deeper details to document how much more secure it will be. I know it's one thing to "say" it's more secure, and another to be able to show the chain of command.

Lowell--There is no spoon, and there's no default ORDER BY in sql server either.Actually, Common Sense is so rare, it should be considered a Superpower. --my son